We haven't had a good time
travel movie in ages. I guess Looper was
the last one. But Mr. Peabody and Sherman,
out today, is a lovely time travel film, that has fun with the conventions of the genre. And it tells a unique story about how mastery over past and present
doesn't save you from the heartbreak of your kid growing up.

Some day, people from the distant future will travel back to our era and inform us that science has …
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Some minor spoilers ahead...

Mr. Peabody and
Sherman updates and expands a series of cartoon shorts from 50 years ago,
that appeared as part of the Rocky and
Bullwinkle show. The basic setup is pretty simple: Mr. Peabody is a supergenius
talking dog, who's invented a time machine, and he takes a young boy named
Sherman on adventures throughout history.

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For the movie version, these thumbnail-sketch characters are
fleshed out, and their relationship is clarified. Turns out Mr. Peabody was a
super-mutant dog who didn't belong with the other dogs, and his accomplishments
were nearly limitless until he discovered a human baby and decided to take on
the ultimate challenge: fatherhood. Now, the dog is raising a human child, and
facing all the normal challenges of taking care of a kid, plus a few extra
ones.

When Sherman goes off to school for the first time, there
are two conflicts set in motion simultaneously: Mr. Peabody has a hard time
dealing with the fact that his adoptive son is growing up and becoming an
independent person. And Sherman gets teased about the fact that his father is a
dog, and winds up biting Penny, the school's main "mean girl" —
which leads, in turn, to Child Protective Services being called to assess
whether Mr. Peabody is really a fit parent to a human child.

To its credit, the movie juggles these two conflicts, which
are very different in nature and tend to go in almost opposite directions,
without ever losing its balance. In fact, the movie plays the two conflicts
(letting go versus proving your worth as a parent) off against each other, in a
way that's sometimes quite clever and also emotionally enriching. A lot of
animated films barely manage to sustain one conflict for 90 minutes, but Peabody successfully keeps two boiling
over. Not only that, but it works these two opposing conflicts into an
entertaining, coherent time-travel story. Which is no mean feat.

And
the movie's handling of the time-travel stuff is deft and fun and clearly
owes a lot to films like Back to the
Future and the Bill and Ted duology.
Meddling in history turns out about as well as it usually does, and there are
the requisite number of time paradoxes and temporal pratfalls. Fixing the
space-time continuum dovetails pretty neatly with fixing both Mr. Peabody's
relationship with his son and his tricky status in the eyes of the law.

This Friday, at long last, Mr. Peabody and Sherman hits theaters, and everyone who grew up loving…
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It all leads up to an emotionally powerful scene that is
pretty much guaranteed to make you cry your eyes out, which respects the
complexity of the themes this film has been tackling, and packs a clever
solution to the film's central time-travel dilemma.

A lot of time travel films are about loss, or the potential
for loss — Safety Not Guaranteed does
a lot of great stuff with this — but relatively few time-travel stories deal
with the inevitable loss that a parent experiences watching a child grow up,
along with the fear of losing a child. Mr.
Peabody takes a very light-hearted approach to exploring history and
dealing with time paradoxes, while giving the full weight to the terrible
things that time does to the parent-child relationship.

Now for the bad news: The humor in this movie mostly falls
flat. Not horribly flat, just kind of flat. Most of the jokes are duds. There's
an excessive corniness to the puns and verbal jokes — although a lot of the
slapstick comedy with our heroes running around the past is highly
entertaining, and plays off the bracing visuals in a fun way. Still, most of the jokes and gags in the film are bland and fail to
achieve their meager ambitions. It's not as bad as the endless recycled
mother-in-law jokes in The Croods,
but there may be a certain amount of eye-rolling at the humor in Peabody.

It's weird that a film that's so smart, in so many ways,
settles for such dumb, under-achieving humor. Every now and then, a clever gag
does sneak through — like a running joke about Leonardo da Vinci's creepy baby
automaton, for example. And the meta-joke (which is in all the trailers) where
Mr. Peabody brings a mini-Trojan Horse inside the Trojan Horse is pretty
brilliant. Plus several moments are cute, even if they're not actually funny.
Plus Stephen Colbert and Mel Brooks, among others, lend a welcome zing to the
voice cast and it's fun to play "spot that comedian" among the minor characters.
And the film seems like it's going to veer into fat-shaming humor at one point,
only to zig-zag into something a darn sight better.

All in all, Mr. Peabody and Sherman is a film you can take
your kids to, without being bored or annoyed — it's no Lego Movie, but I'd say it's competitive with Frozen in terms of general watchability. Parents will resonate with
the well-thought-out, emotionally honest treatment of the bond between a parent
and a child, and all the insecurities that come with it. And time-travel nerds
will be amused by the temporal shenanigans.

It all adds up to a film that shows how time travel can be
used as a metaphor for nearly universal experiences. In the end, in Peabody and
Sherman, the tangled relationship in which a child outgrows a parent, who's
striving desperately not to fail at parenting, is the greatest paradox of them
all.